Photo credit: Plumas County Sheriff Office

Keddie, a quiet and peaceful resort town of log cabins, was the site of a horrific quadruple homicide in 1981. On the night of April 11, 14-year-old Sheila Sharpe had gone to a neighbor’s house to spend the night. When she came home in the morning, she found that her mother, Sue, her brother Johnny and his friend Dana had all been tied up and stabbed to death. Her younger sister, Tina, was missing, yet her younger brothers, Ricky and Greg, and their friend Justin were unharmed in the brothers’ bedroom.
The police were at a loss to uncover a killer or a motive. The murder victims had been relentlessly tortured. Sue and Johnny had been struck with a hammer, and Dana had been strangled. The stabbing had been so violent that the blade of the murder weapon, a steak knife, was bent backward.
Incredibly, Ricky and Greg said that they had slept through the attack. But Justin changed his story several times. In one of his accounts, he said that he witnessed the murders and Tina being taken. In other statements, he claimed to have dreamed the incidents he described.
In 1984, Tina’s skull was found 50 kilometers (30 mi) away from Keddie. Her cause of death could not be determined, but it seemed that she had died the night of the attack. Meanwhile, the search for the murderer was at a standstill. There were still no suspects, although Justin’s father, Martin Smartt, and his friend Bo Boubede acted strangely when they were interviewed by police.
Smartt even described how the murders might have been carried out yet was never pressed further. Years after the murders, his therapist claimed that Smartt once said that he had killed Sue because she encouraged his wife to divorce him. He supposedly killed Tina, too, but denied killing Johnny and Dana. Both Smartt and Boubede are long dead, however, and the case remains officially unsolved.